


Master of My Fate Means Destroying Yours

by victoriousscarf



Series: Beware of Heroes [14]
Category: Dune - All Media Types, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Alternate Universe - Science Fiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-14
Updated: 2014-11-14
Packaged: 2018-02-25 08:19:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,296
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2614874
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/victoriousscarf/pseuds/victoriousscarf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Regret is a matter of perspective that Sauron has never mastered.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Master of My Fate Means Destroying Yours

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Meddalarksen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Meddalarksen/gifts).



> "Innocence" by Halestorm may be the most horrifyingly perfect song for this
> 
> For Medda. YOU ENCOURAGED MY SAURON FEELINGS THIS IS YOUR FAULT

“Is there nothing you regret?” Melkor asked, and it had been eons since Sauron stood in front of his former master. In fact, he had to bit the metal tongue he had now not to say his regret was finding that Melkor still lurked at the corners of the universe.

Though regret might not have been quite the right term either.

“I am surprised,” Sauron admitted, and his body was ugly now, nothing like the ghola Melkor had kept creating, every time his servant died. He whipped the slate of Sauron’s talent clean and sent him out again, to do his bidding, a servant of machines clothed still in human flesh.

But then the rebellion, the humans and former masters against the machines they had once enslaved and which now ruled the galaxy. The humans, against all odds of evolution and biology, had actually _won_ and Melkor had disappeared.

Sauron thought it had been for good. He stopped allowing himself to die, became the master of his own fate and lived for centuries on his own. His body had deteriorated over that time, and he had used snatches of the Tleilaxu technology which had created his body as well as various other more mechanical modifications. Eventually, there was little organic left him him, and he prowled around the edges of a universe that condemned machines, whose religion enshrined that no human would make a computer in the likeness of a human mind.

He had spent decades in the cold of space, laughing madly at their childish politics and wondered where he might fit in.

He had been human once.

He had had flesh, could remember the warmth of skin and the ways that pain could be brought to a body. Unlike some of the gholas that existed now, he had never recovered his original memories, had never remembered all the times he had died for Melkor.

What he did remember most clearly was making the active choice that this time, he would not die for a master such as this.

So he ran away and hid, because in his last life he had made a mistake horrible enough for Melkor to kill him himself, and the machine had pinned the body on the side of his stronghold, for his new ghola to see.

The lesson he had learned was not the one Melkor intended.

When Melkor fell, Sauron laughed, because he had a slavish devotion to the machine and a seething hatred of everything that Melkor had forced upon him.

For several years he had lived among the humans as if he had always been there. He had pretended to be one of them as they celebrated their victory, tore down the system of the machines and left their hulking metal bodies as monuments to what would never happen again.

Which was where he met Celebrimbor in that life.

He wondered later, if they had met before because Celebrimbor had been standing at the base of one old general, the precious metals that made up its eyes and insides long since stripped away and melted down for the war effort. But when Sauron approached, Celebrimbor had let him, though his eyes were suspicious.

“Not many come here,” he remarked, and Sauron had smiled, had lied about his name. He looked different now than during the war. His hair was longer, twisted at the base of his neck and there were dark tattoos around his eyes because he was sick of seeing his reflection in the mirror that looked too much like Melkor’s willing slave.

“It is remarkable,” Sauron had said instead of directly answering. “That such things once ruled us.”

“Remarkable?” Celebrimbor said. He smiled and shook his head, looking back at the general like he admired the twisted metal in some fashion and Sauron wanted to croon at him.

“Do you have any regrets?” Melkor asked him now, both of them twisted approximations of what they had been so long ago and Sauron laughed, the sound grating metal against metal and shook his head.

Except for the tiny echo, a synapse he thought he had carved out of himself, which whispered Celebrimbor’s name.

The boy that had smiled at the ruins of machines, who had been bright in a landscape of death and destruction, whose entire family had fallen to the war and their own desperate desires. In the end he would not be much different, for having outlived them all. The one who gave Sauron almost everything he wanted and had kissed his flesh like he loved it.

Celebrimbor who he had seduced, using pretty words and his beautiful body which no one expected to still harbor the mind of a machine master. He had coaxed Celebrimbor past the new laws, had convinced him to dance so daringly close to the thinking machine’s technology and every time he had started to question, Sauron curled his fingers around his chin and kissed him. He had learned every inch of skin to run his fingers along, had caught Celebrimbor’s hitched breathing in his mouth.

And yet the boy had still betrayed him.

At the end, when Sauron had almost everything in his grasp, their minds together creating more than either could have hoped to, Celebrimbor had ran away. Had betrayed him to Galadriel, last of the great generals from the war, more interested in her new order now.

But she remembered him, and came after him with all the fury that had once carried her through the war alive. Except Sauron found Celebrimbor before Galadriel found him, and he spent a week stripping the flesh from Celebrimbor in strips, holding them up in front of his face. The skin that Sauron had once spent hours kissing and stroking was now turned into bloody debris that he tossed to the side when as if they meant nothing, and never had. He had broken bones in the graceful body, turning his legs to mush and listening to screams that had once been pleasurable turn to unimagined pain.

“You should have known better,” he whispered, when Celebrimbor could no longer speak, only gurgling sounds coming from his lungs and throat but his eyes had still watched Sauron like he knew, in some way. “You should never have allowed me inside.”

He left what remained of Celebrimbor upon the cliff face to be found when Galadriel finally found him and left for the outer regions of unexplored space. While the humans were trying to harness a new form of space travel, he used the old computers and fled to where they could not follow, and laid in wait.

There were other victims of course, and he lost the form that had once been beautiful and felt pleasure, recreating himself constantly into a more monstrous form. He hid and waited, watching. Even the messiah that could see the future barely caught a glimpse of him, and he waited for that figure to fall too, as all mortal humans did.

But then from the farthest corner of space, a stream of humans who he had not realized dared the unexplored space came streaming back in fear and rage, and Melkor came behind them.

He no longer prostrated himself to his former master, and that only seemed to please Melkor.

“Come,” his old master said. “Tell me of your exploits. Of all the creatures I expected to find, you were not one of them.”

And then he asked, amusement evident in his mechanical voice. “Is there nothing you regret?”

“What could I?” he asked, and it had been centuries since he felt a warm sun, and even more since a boy with bright eyes and a glittering mind had looked at him like love was something he might ever have been worthy of.

 

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] Master of My Fate Means Destroying Yours by victoriousscarf](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5299604) by [pumpkinpodfic (thegreatpumpkin)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegreatpumpkin/pseuds/pumpkinpodfic)




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